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Two studies investigate the production and perception of speech chunks in Estonian. A corpus study examines to what degree the boundaries of syntactic constituents and frequent collocations influence the distribution of prosodic information in spontaneously spoken utterances. A perception experiment tests to what degree prosodic information, constituent structure, and collocation frequencies interact in the perception of speech chunks. Two groups of native Estonian speakers rated spontaneously spoken utterances for the presence of disjunctures, whilst listening to these utterances (N = 47) or reading them (N = 40). The results of the corpus study reveal a rather weak correspondence between the distribution of prosodic information and boundaries of the syntactic constituents and collocations. The results of the perception experiments demonstrate a strong influence of clause boundaries on the perception of prosodic discontinuities as prosodic breaks. Thus, the results indicate that there is no direct relationship between the semantico-syntactic characteristics of utterances and the distribution of prosodic information. The percept of a prosodic break relies on the rapid recognition of constituent structure, i.e. structural information.
Since Vietnamese is an isolating language, word order plays an important role in identifying the function of a particular word. Yet in some contexts word order may be flexible especially in the case of special information-structural settings. Discontinuous noun phrases constitute a specific case of non-canonical word order in Vietnamese.
I have conducted two read-speech experiments in order to find out whether there are prosodic or intonational effects in a comparison between continuous and discontinuous noun phrases in Vietnamese. In the first experiment, speakers from the Northern dialect were recorded and in the second experiment speakers from the Southern dialect. The results showed prosodic differences in the two word order conditions in both dialects. The duration of the classifier is significantly longer (p<0.001, ANOVA calculation) in the case of discontinuous noun phrases and the rising tone (sắc) is clearly articulated as rising. In the case of continuous noun phrases, the duration of the classifier is significantly shorter (p<0.001, ANOVA calculation) and a classifier with rising tone may lose its rising property. These prosodic effects are related to prosodic boundaries. In the case of discontinuous noun phrases, the classifier constitutes the prosodic boundary, whereas with continuous noun phrases, the (right) prosodic boundary occurs further to the right.
I assume that in Vietnamese there is generally a correspondence between syntactic and prosodic structure as in Selkirk (2011) and Féry (2017).
This means that for example the DP hai trái cam ‘two oranges’ (two CLF orange) is matched by a prosodic phrase, thus (hai trái cam)Φ. However, when the noun cam ‘orange’ is separated from the numeral-classifier complex, the noun and the classifier form a prosodic phrase on their own: (hai trái)Φ. It can thus be concluded that intonation effects in Vietnamese are not only present when expressing sentence modality and when changing the role of function words (Đỗ et al. 1998 and Hạ & Grice 2010), but they also play a role in word order change, as in discontinuous nominal phrases.
When it comes to syntactic aspects of discontinuous noun phrases, I discuss whether split constructions in Vietnamese involve movement as proposed by Trịnh (2011) or base-generation as put forward by Fanselow & Féry (2006). I argue for base-generation analysis since the second part of a discontinuous NP (remnant) may also occur outside of discontinuous noun phrases without its head noun and some discontinuous noun phrases do not have a continuous counterpart. My study confirms the connection between syntax and prosody.
The two parts of the discontinuous noun phrase form their own phrases syntactically as well as prosodically.
This paper compares the production of different types of direct objects by Portuguese–German and Polish–German bilingual school-aged children in their heritage languages (HLs), Polish and European Portuguese (EP). Given that the two target languages display identical options of object realization, our main research question is whether the two HLs develop in a similar way in bilingual children. More precisely, we aim at investigating whether bilingual children acquiring Polish and EP are sensitive to accessibility and animacy when realizing a direct object in their HL. The results of a production experiment show that this is indeed the case and that the two groups of bilinguals do not differ from each other, although they may overgeneralize null objects or full noun phrases to some extent. We conclude that the bilingual acquisition of object realization is guided by the relevant properties in the target languages and is not influenced by the contact language, German.
Left dislocation in Zulu
(2004)
This paper examines left dislocation constructions in Zulu, a Southern Bantu language belonging to the Nguni group (Zone S 40). In Zulu left dislocation configurations, a topic phrase in the beginning of the sentence is linked to a resumptive element within the associated clause. Typically, the resumptive element is an incorporated pronoun (cf. Bresnan & Mchombo 1987), as illustrated by the examples in (1) and (2). In these examples, the object pronoun (in italics) is part of the verbal morphology and agrees with the noun class (gender) of the dislocate. This situation is schematically illustrated in (3), where co-indexation represents agreement: ...
This dissertation investigates a special class of anaphoric form, yè, in Ewe known as the logophoric pronoun. This research makes a number of novel observations.
In the first chapter, I introduce the reader to the phenomenon under investigation as well as provide information on Ewe and its dialects and, methodology. In Chapter 2, I present the pronominal system of Ewe which is categorised into strong and weak forms following Cardinaletti & Starke (1994) and Agbedor (1996). The distribution of pronouns is outlined which sets the tone for an overview of logophoric marking. In this respect, I present variations in logophoric marking strategies cross linguistically and show that Ewe differs significantly from other pronouns in this category. In an effort to explain the deviant case of yè, I entertain the idea that yè is a pure logophoric pronoun in the sense of Clements (1975) and thus, its additional de re and strict interpretation does not imply non-logophoricity.
Chapter 3 demonstrates that yè is sensitive to contexts which portray the intention of an individual. Following Sells (1987), the antecedent of yè must have an intention to communicate. I broadly categorize logophoric contexts into reportative (direct-indirect speech) or non-reportative (speaker’s mental attitude, reporter’s observation or background knowledge of a situation). Based on this categorization, indirect speech report (Clements 1975), dis- course units such as a paragraph or an episode (Clements 1975), and sentential adjuncts such as purpose, causal and consequence clauses (Culy 1994a) are reviewed. The logophoric pro- noun occurs in the complement of attitude verbs (Clements 1975), also termed logocentric (à la (Stirling 1994)) or logophoric predicates (à la (Culy 1994a)) as well as with non-attitudinal verbs (e.g. va ‘come’ or wO ‘do’ as in sentential adjuncts). I argue contra Clements (1975) and Culy (1994a) that yè can occur with perception predicates. I further provide three new instances of non-reportative contexts which are compatible with yè namely, as-if clauses, benefactive na clauses and alesi ‘how’ clauses. I show, corroborating previous studies that contexts which are necessary for the licensing of yè include all of the aforementioned except causal clauses. Among these contexts, the complementizer be or regarding cases where there is no be, an element in C (due to the Doubly-Filled-Comp Filter (DFCF) c.f. Chomsky & Lasnik (1977)), is sufficient to license yè. Following Bimpeh & Sode (2021), yè is licensed by feature checking (in the spirit of von Stechow (2004)): be bears the interpretatble [log] feature which checks the uninterpretable [log] feature of yè. I include a redefinition of logophoricity as pertaining to Ewe.
Given the disparity found in the literature concerning the interpretation of yè: Ewedome (pronounce EVedome) has only de se readings (Bimpeh 2019); while ‘pure’ Ewe, Mina (variety of Ewe spoken in Togo) Pearson (2015), Danyi (O’Neill 2015) and Anlo (pronounced ANlO) (Satık 2019) has de re readings; chapter 4 aims at lending empirical support to the ungoing discussion by verifying the interpretation of yè. Two acceptability judgment tasks were conducted namely, truth value judgment task and binary forced choice task. The results corroborates Pearson (2012, 2015) and others’ discovery that yè has a de re interpretation in the Ewedome (contra Bimpeh (2019); Bimpeh et al. (2022)), Anlo and Tonu (pronounced TONu) dialects of Ewe.
In chapter 5, I discuss the relation between logophoricity (yè, yè a) and Control (PRO). I show that yè may be restricted to a set of verbs which obligatorily require the morpheme a ‘potential marker’ (Essegbey 2008), in subject position. This set of verbs are those that are known as control verbs c.f. (Landau 1999) in English. As a result of this restriction, research such as Satık (2019) claims that yè a is the overt instantiation of PRO in English. According to the Ewe facts, it appears as though on one hand, yè and PRO share similar properties in logophoric contexts and on the other hand, yè in combination with the potential marker, a also share properties with PRO in subject control environments. Against this background, I discuss the relation between yè, yè a and PRO and show that neither yè in isolation nor yè in combination with a, contrary to Satık (2019), is the overt instantiation of PRO. I clarify that the potential morpheme a is not cliticised or combined with the logophoric yè. The two forms are seperate morphemes. The potential marker a only shows up in control environments because a sub-class of verbs require it for grammaticality purposes. As such, the property of de se-ness does not come from yè by itself, yè a or a but rather from the sub-class of verbs which require the potential marker a...
Whether minorities such as the Māori in Aotearoa New Zealand, the San across Southern Africa and the Métis in Canada, or native majority peoples such as the Aymara and Quechua in South America: indigenous peoples" lifeworlds have been transfigured by the difficulties originating from a history of conquest, settlement and suppression. The imperialist strife of European empires and the atrocities committed by their gang of "explorers" – including "this person Cook" in the South Pacific, Columbus in North America, Cortéz in Mexico, Gomes in West Africa, or van Riebeeck in South Africa – was aimed at enforcing European values and institutions, destroying, silencing or marginalizing indigenous cultures and societies as inferior "others." Unsurprisingly, the disruption of formal colonialism in the second half of the 20th century held no inherent improvement for the concerns of formerly colonized peoples. ...
There are two main approaches to change of state verbs. One adopts an approach in terms of a total change (becomeP, for base predicate P), i.e., a change from not being in the extension of the base predicate to being in it. The other adopts an approach in terms of a relative change (becomemore P, for base predicate P), i.e., a change for a theme in which it increases in the extent to which it holds the property denoted by the base predicate. Different languages have been analyzed using one or the other approach. I argue that both proposals are actually appropriate for analyzing related but not (completely) overlapping phenomena in the domain of derived change of state verbs in the very same language. This proposal is based on the discussion of change of state verbs in Southern Aymara that are derived with the suffixes -pta and -ra. I show that verbs with -pta convey the meaning of total change and that verbs with -ra convey the meaning of relative change. I further discuss how expressions with -pta and -ra interact: expressions with -ra implicate that the theme does not change from not being in the extension of the base to being in it. I propose an account in terms of scalar implicatures in which -pta and -ra are lexical alternatives, thus extending the domain of linguistic phenomena for which the computation of scalar implicatures is relevant.
This paper offers a description and account of the patterns of 'ex-situ' focus in Dagbani. We show that there are two syntactic strategies for creating 'ex-situ' focus in the language, one involving A’-movement to the left periphery, and the second involving base generation in the left periphery combined with coreference to a resumptive pronoun. Furthermore, we argue that subjects are difficult to move from Spec,TP to Spec,CP in the left-periphery because of 'anti-locality', which creates a tension when trying to focus subjects, which are required to derivationally fill the specifier of both positions. We further show that what looks to be a two-way distinction between the behaviour of subjects and non-subjects in the language is in fact a three-way distinction between subjects that are focussed to a local left-periphery, subjects that are focussed to a non-local left-periphery, and non-subjects. These distinctions arise due to there being two methods for Dagbani to resolve the antilocality problem of subject movement, and so local subjects solve the problem differently to non-local subjects.
This dissertation investigates several aspects of nominal modification in Ògè, an understudied language of Benue-congo spoken in Àkókó Northwest in Nigeria. The study focuses on two areas of nominal modification namely, Nominal Attributive Modifiers (NAMs) and the strategies of number marking.
The discussion and analysis of NAMs in the language reveal that Ògè belongs to the group of languages which lacks adjectives as a lexical category. NAMs are nominal and they
are derived from an existing lexical category namely, verbs. Predicative modifiers and NAMs have forms that are similar to the long and short forms (LF & SF) of adjectives in languages in which adjectives form an open class, for example, Russian, SerBoCroatian (BCS) and German.
Based on the Minimalist program, the dissertation reveals that unlike Russian, BCS, and German in which the discrepancies between the two forms of adjectives are related to definiteness (as in the case of BCS) and Agree, the discrepancies in the two forms of modifiers in Ògè are related to the fact that Ògè lacks adjectives and resorts into the nominalization of stative verbs in order to derive attributive forms. Using the analyses of adjuncts according to Truswell (2004) and Zeijlstra (2020), the dissertation proposes that NAMs are adjuncts in a modification structure while they are heads in possessive and genitive constructions. In addition, I propose that NAMs are attributive-only modifiers which modify the NP rather than
the DP.
The dissertation also investigates the strategies of number marking in Ògè. Unlike languages in which number marking is obligatory in the nominal domain (Hebrew, German, English),
nouns in Ògè are not always marked for number. This means that nouns in Ògè have general number. The general number nature of nouns in Ògè is like that of the nouns in modifying plural marking languages namely, Halkomelem, Korean, Yucatec Maya and Yorùbá. However, I argue that unlike the modifying plural marking languages in which the Number Phrase (NumP) is not projected, NumP is projected in the nominal spine of Ògè, claiming that NumP bears an
interpretable number feature which values the uninterpretable number feature in D. Argument in support of this comes from the interpretation of the noun in the presence of òtúro (an element which translates to the plural definite interpretation of the noun). I analyze òtúro as a plural determiner which occupies the D-head in the syntax of Ògè. The dissertation argues following Alexiadou (2019) that the locus of the occurrence of the marker of plurality in the nominal spine does not depend on its interpretation as a plural morpheme, rather, the locus of the occurrence of the element that is sensitive to the plural interpretation of the noun depends on other parameters which are definiteness, specificity and animacy.
This paper discusses the syntax of relative clauses in European Portuguese (EP) by focussing on the status of the relativizer que in restrictive and appositive relative clauses. We propose a unified account of que in terms of a D-element and discuss the syntactic implications of this assumption for an adequate analysis of relative clauses in EP. We assume that relative que has properties of demonstrative and interrogative determiners. In restrictive object and subject relative clauses, que occurs as a transitive determiner [DP que [NP e]], which selects for a nominal complement, whereas in prepositional and appositive relative clauses, [DP que] is an intransitive determiner parallel to an e-type pronoun. We discuss the position of restrictive relative clauses in the DP containing the modified noun, and propose that they are merged pre-nominally, in the same fashion as demonstratives.
The languages of the world differ with respect to argument extraction possibilities. In languages such as English, wh-movement is possible from Spec IP and from the complement position, whereas in languages such as Malagasy only extraction from Spec IP is possible. This difference correlates with the fact that these language types obey different island constraints and behave differently with respect to wh-in situ and superiority effects. The goal of this paper is to outline an analysis for these differences. The basic idea is that in contrast to languages such as English, in Malagasy-type languages every argument can be merged in the complement position of the selecting head.
In this article, I discuss some important properties of wh-questions and wh-scrambling in Japanese. The questions I will address are (i) which instances of (wh-) scrambling involve reconstruction and (ii) how the undoing effects of scrambling can be derived. First I will discuss the claim that (wh-) scrambling is semantically vacuous and is therefore undone at LF (Saito 1989, 1992). Then I consider the data that led Takahashi (1993) to the conclusion that at least some instances of wh-scrambling have to be analyzed as instances of "full wh-movement" i.e., overt movement of the wh-phrase in its scopal position. It will be argued that these examples are not instances of full wh-movement in Japanese, but that they also represent semantically vacuous scrambling. Those instances of scrambling that apprently cannot be undone are best explained with recourse to parsing effects. I conclude that wh-scrambling in Japanese is always triggered by a ([-wh]-) scrambling feature. In addition, long distance scrambling (scrambling out of finite CPs) is analyzed as adjunction movement, whereas short distance scrambling is movement to a specifier position of IP. Turning to the mechanisms of undoing, I will argue that only long distance scrambling is undone. This is shown to follow from Chomsky's (1995) bare phrase structure analysis, according to which multi-segmental categories derived by adjunction movement are not licensed at LF. The article is organized as follows. In section 2, the wh-scrambling phenomenon is described. In section 3, I discuss the reconstruction properties of scrambling. In addition, this section provides some basic assumptions about my analysis of Japanese scrambling in general. In section 4, I turn to the analysis of wh-scrambling as an instance of full wh-movement in Japanese. Section 5 provides discussion of multiple wh-questions in Japanese, and section 6 gives the conclusion.